Last Friday we received a frantic call from yet another business saying their data center / service provider was closing down. They were given a three-day notice (pretty good comparing to other similar situations) and told that they needed to get their equipment & data out. Unfortunately, *not* an uncommon scenario these days…
We spent a couple of hours discussing possible solutions including colo service, where they would just bring their VOIP systems over to our data center, dedicated servers that we would setup with new installs of CentOS and Windows Server 2008 R2 + a Cisco ASA for firewall / VPN protection, and finally a hybrid approach using cloud servers that they could expand as their business expands + an ASA to secure everything. They chose the hybrid approach as it was the most economical, plus gave them the ability to expand as needed. We had the servers setup within a few short hours and they began setting up the servers & migrating their data.
By Monday afternoon, going with a hybrid approach turns out to be the best choice. They found that some of their software was going to be more difficult than expected to upgrade. They have a colo server with their main PBX system, a dedicated firewall / vpn device (Cisco ASA 5505), a Linux cloud server that will take over as their PBX as soon as they get some software issues hammered out, and a Windows-based cloud server running their billing systems.
Your data center partner should be helping you with these types of solutions. If they are not, email sales@cera.net and we’ll get you started.